On Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki. In the days since, it has become the most-discussed interview we've done in three years on the show. Listeners who wrote in to us said they were shocked to hear the leader of a platform with 151.5 million monthly users, most of them minors, express frustration and annoyance at being asked about the company's history of failures related to child safety. Journalists described the interview as "bizarre," "unhinged," and a "car crash."
And a case can be made that it was all of those things — even if Baszucki, in the studio afterwards and later on X, insisted to us that he had had a good time. In the moment, though, Baszucki's dismissive attitude toward discussing child safety struck me as something worse: familiar.
Baszucki, after all, is not the first CEO to have insisted to me that a platform's problems are smaller than I am making them out to be. Nor is he the first to blame the platform's enormous scale, or to try to change the subject. (He is the first tech CEO to suggest to me that maybe there should be prediction markets in video games for children, but that's another story.)
What people found noteworthy about our interview, I think, was the fresh evidence that our most successful tech CEOs really do think and talk this way. Given a chance to display empathy for the victims of crimes his platform enabled, or to convey regret about historical safety lapses, or even just to gesture at some sense of responsibility for the hundreds of millions of children who in various ways are depending on him, the CEO throws up his hands and asks: how long are you guys going to be going on about all this stuff?
The problem is capitalism.
Profits > Humans (in this case, children)
It's even worse than that.
At it's root, capitalism, as shown via Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory, infers that wealth equals virtue. To receive wealth is to have provided a benefit to society, and to be bereft of wealth is to contribute little while taking much. This system inadvertedly places a dollar value on the abuse of minors in Roblox: any suffering caused is of no consequence to the great good being provided to society, otherwise Roblox would go bankrupt.
CEOs and corporations take the moral high ground because they live within a system that tells them that wealth is virtue, and they are overflowing in wealth. Until we accept that the core principals of capitalism are flawed, we will never begin holding bad actor's appropriately accountable.
I would like to point out that Adam Smith "did not" suggest wealth = virtue. Wealth of Nations even have a whole book devoted to morality.
The current trend of equaling wealth to virtue came from Puritanism, Calvinism, which evolved into neo-liberalism now.
For more information about Puritanism and Calvinism and their relationship with capitalism, please refer to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber.
He did not explicity state this, no. But the entire premise of the invisible hand metaphor is to show that a core function of the capitalist system is that it moves wealth to those that bring good to their society. The natural inference from this is that wealth is representative of virtue, ie, if Roblox was doing net bad things, it wouldn't be worth millions.
Don't get me wrong, fuck the various Catholic attempts to justify wealth as a virtue too, but the issue is as prevalent in the secular world as it is in the non-secular.
It's even worse than that.
We are somewhere between 5 and 7 years into the problems with Roblox being well documented by everything from major media outlets to national governments. It's well past the point of blaming nievete or ignorance.
Parents are doing a cost benefit analysis and speculating that their kid won't be one of the victims. They are paying to put their kids in harms way because they see the high liklihood of social isolation or temper tantrums to be a greater problem than risk posed by Nazis, and groomers.
It's even worse than that.
I don't know how, I just wanted to say it, too.
In fact I'd argue you're not even going far enough: it's even worse than that.
More "capitalists" need to read Adam Smith.